Social Learning and Voluntary Cooperation among Like-Minded People

Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they
experience free riding.We test the hypothesis that groups whose
members know that they are composed only of “likeminded”
cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the
most cooperative, randomly composed groups. Our experiments confirm
this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of
“like-minded” free riders do not cooperate. Yet, we find
a high level of strategic cooperation that eventually col-lapses.
Our results underscore the importance of group composition and
social learning by heterogeneously motivated agents to understand
the dynamics of cooperation and free riding